Oxford Wargamers friendly competition

Oxford Wargamer's Round Robin Competition.

The Oxford club invited teams of four from three other clubs to take part in their annual “round robin” competition. Thames Valley sent a team.

The competition is organised for a fun day for all. Four teams, each of four players, play four games. One member from each team playing a different game, and then moving to another game in subsequent sessions. Thus everyone plays everything, and hopefully against different people.

All the games were written, or modified from extant rules by the Oxford club. The emphasis was on simplicity, so that four people could pick up the rules and play a game or two within a 1½ hour session.



Good games!

Oxford Wargamer's Round Robin Competition.

The Oxford club invited teams of four from three other clubs to take part in their annual “round robin” competition. Thames Valley sent a team.

The competition is organised for a fun day for all. Four teams, each of four players, play four games. One member from each team playing a different game, and then moving to another game in subsequent sessions. Thus everyone plays everything, and hopefully against different people.

All the games were written, or modified from extant rules by the Oxford club. The emphasis was on simplicity, so that four people could pick up the rules and play a game or two within a 1½ hour session.

Good games!

There was an ACW game for two sides using a familiar rule type for the period. The idea being to hold and take terrain features for points. The team with the most won. First and second places being determined by the person who inflicted most casualties on the enemy. It took a while to realise that the key to the game was to take ground, regardless of casualties, to ensure being first or second. I realised it too late!

The second game was all the players against the umpire (The Umpire Strikes Back?). The Umpire had a bunch of elephants to hurl across the field against a phalanx. The phalanx did no fighting but were targets for the elephants, each player being responsible for defending ¼ of the phalanx. To this end the players had four skirmish units to shoot the elephants to try to kill them or, at the least, to herd them into some else's part of the table. There was also skulduggery possible by trapping another player's skirmisher against an advancing elephant, leaving him nowhere to go.

The third game was a game for four separate player's. Fuzzy wuzzies attacking a square. Each player controlling a bunch of attackers as well as a side of the square. Points awarded for casualties or breaking the square. If you attacked your own side of the square you inflicted points on yourself whichever way the fight went! An initiative based game, hard to build a strategy as the player with initiative was able to move or rotate the square. Fun game.



The last game was a double blind game, where only the umpire knew where all the player's were. North American Indians spying out the opposition's camp (French Indian wars). A very good game with the umpire able to keep both sides, divided by a screen, sufficiently in the dark as to the action of the opposition. Two teams of two (the winer decided on points) had to sneak their Indian scouts across the table, observe the enemy camp for as long as possible, and then sneak back. The Enemy trying the same thing in the opposite direction. If you saw the enemy you were allowed to shoot arrows at him!

The Thames Valley team were able to hold first place for the first two sessions, but then took a disastrous dive during the third. Still we managed to fight back a bit in the fourth session to finish second overall.

I hope that I can go to this event again. A suggestion from the hosts was that each team bring a game with an umpire, sound good to me. Another suggestion was that maybe we could host a similar event in late Spring/early Summer.